One-Time Donations for 2018

Great news! “Ions” has been ported from Flash to HTML5. The load lightened just enough at the end of the school year to allow me to finish the port of the Ion Formation tutorial. The new HTML5 version leads students through the formation of positive and negative ions, and should run on any modern browser..

If you have already donated to the site, thank you! As of the time this writing, we are past the halfway mark of our yearly goal of $2500 to keep the site running. If you have not donated yet, please consider donating. www.simbucket.com, ChemThink, and www.quizevolved.com rely on your support to pay for the cost of their web server.

Great news! “The Behavior of Gases” has been ported from Flash to HTML5. This ChemThink tutorial took a lot of time to make, and it looks great! All of the original controls are here, and the question set is as challenging as ever. Students will adjust temperature, number of atoms, pressure, and volume to see how this affects the frequency and force of the collisions with the walls of the container.

If you have already donated to the site, thank you! As of the time this writing, we are nearly halfway to meeting our yearly goal of $2500 to keep the site running. If you have not donated yet, please consider donating. www.simbucket.com, ChemThink, and www.quizevolved.com rely on your support to pay for the cost of their web server.

Last week I received an invoice from our web hosting company with a huge price increase for our servers. Up until this year, I have been able to pay for both sites with help from a few users, but with the price increase I can no longer afford the expense.

In order to ensure the financial stability of www.simbucket.com and www.quizevolved.com, we are planning an annual donation drive. So far, we have collected the following donations for 2018:

1. I have consolidated all of our web services down to just two: a cloud-based VPS provider and Amazon Web Services. We now have a single, modern, powerful VPS that can easily handle all of the load for several hundred dollars cheaper per year than before.

2. At the end of 2018, I will review our income and expenses to make sure the websites are still financially viable.

Please donate today! If you are willing to donate for SimBucket, ChemThink, or QuizEvolved, please click here to continue to the donation form. With your help, I hope we can keep these sites free forever.

We had a great evening of physics demos and discussions on Wednesday night. Thanks to Marty (CHS), Dave (CHS), Caleb (CHS), Josh (PMSA), Kunal (HPHS), Bryan ( GBN), Mark (PHS), Mike (SHS), and Sasha (Northwestern University) for sharing. The hosts were excited to give away 3D printed models of the “Accurate PVC Launcher”, “Moment of Inertia Spinner”, “Cheap Pulley”, and “Adjustable Frequency PVC Horn”. All of the designs were built using the free website www.tinkercad.com.

If you have access to your own 3D printer, you can print your own!

Click on the images below for the model files and instructions for printing the “Accurate PVC Launcher”, “Moment of Inertia Spinner”, “Adjustable Frequency PVC Horn”, and the “Cheap Pulley”:

For the past few years in our regular physics classes, students have struggled to complete the “Pendulum Energy Lab”. This lab involved setting up a mass hanging from the ceiling by a string. Students were asked to shoot video of the mass as it swung back and forth. They then analyzed the video to compute potential energy and kinetic energy at various points during the swing. The problem was that to get the height and speed, they would have to set up multiple meter sticks at lots of different crazy angles, and then have to deal with blurry video. The lab that was designed to show a simple concept ended up being so complicated and taking so much time that most students completely missed the point.

This year we decided to shoot high-quality video of the lab to see if we could distill things down to their essence and eliminate the blurry meterstick mess.

The result is the new “Pendulum Energy Lab” video. Students must still measure height and speed, but this time the measuring devices are perfectly positioned and are easy to read. Students can easily scroll through the video to record height, position, and time. We have included a paper copy of the activity which prompts students to create a data table for potential and kinetic energy at various points, then to create energy bar graphs. We are looking forward to trying the new lab in class on Monday!

The last few days have been rainy in Chicagoland, so we took advantage of the bad weather by launching our indoor air cannon. We have lovingly blasted all of our Nerf darts into oblivion, so yesterday we decided to launch a AA battery instead. We started small, using an 8-foot section of 1/2 inch PVC pipe as a blowgun. Using nothing more than lung power, we were able to launch the 24 gram battery at 22 meters per second. Although this is impressive, we figured that we could push the limits a little and hook up our pressurized air launcher to the PVC pipe. With the air launcher we were able to launch the battery at significantly higher speeds. We launched the “battery cannon” three times. Each time, the battery was safely “caught” by a box mounted to low-friction rails.

As always, we captured the motion of the battery and the box using the Edgertronic high speed camera. Our first shot was captured at 200 frames per second, but we realized that we would need to go to 1000 frames per second for higher launch speeds. The result is a series of videos that students can use to verify the Law of Conservation of Momentum.

Please note that our experimental setup wasn’t perfect, and the battery did ricochet off of the inside of the box, introducing a small but measurable increase in the speed of the box after the collision. This is a perfect opportunity to discuss imperfectly inelastic collisions.

We hope you enjoy the new videos, and please let us know if you are using them in your classroom.

Also, chemistry and biology teachers, we have found that the camera also works great for fast-moving explosions and insects. Please let us know if there is a potentially interesting phenomenon that you would like to see filmed in slow motion!

Today was a beautiful day, perfect for launching the tennis ball cannon on the football field. We had a lot of good shots, and took videos of two of them with an iPhone. The first video was shot from the goal line, and landed in the end zone on the other side of the field. The second shot was also shot from the goal line, but it landed well into the track on the other side, for a total distance of 145 yards!

We wrapped the videos up in the app, and have made them available for student analysis. Enjoy, and please let us know if you are using them in your classes!

We just finished uploading six (really five, because we were able to reuse one of the scenarios) new high-speed videos for Video Motion Analysis called “Horizontal Atwood Lab”. We also put together a very simple lab activity to go with it, suitable for an introductory high school physics classes. In the activity, students analyze sets of three videos to determine the relationships between acceleration and total mass, and acceleration and force. Students should be able to finish the activity in about 30 minutes.

Now that the analysis apps are built, shooting new videos and uploading them goes fairly quickly. Let us know if you have any videos that you would like to see for your class!

We are pleased to announce “Video Motion Analysis“, a new set of apps on www.simbucket.com. Each app features one video shot with a high-speed camera. Students can scroll through each frame and take careful measurements. Some of the apps contain more advanced plotting, graphing, and analysis tools so that students can collect, plot, and analyze the data directly within the app.

We tried the “Ball Launched At An Angle” videos today with our students. Using the graphing and slope calculation tools, they were quickly able to determine that horizontal acceleration is always zero, and vertical acceleration is always 9.8 m/s² downward, no matter which videos they selected for analysis.

We are continuing to shoot video, and hope to have many more videos available for analysis over the coming months. If you have a physics lab that you do with your students and would like us to shoot video, please let us know. We will do our best to recreate it for you and make it available on www.simbucket.com.

The new Video Motion Analysis section can be found on the www.simbucket.com homepage, or via the following direct link.

Welcome to SimBucket!

All of the simulations on this site were built by a small team of teachers. If you see something you like, please share it. If you have an idea for a new simulation, send us an email and we might just build it!